"Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant."Peter Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity (1969)

These days hardly a news cycle goes by without one CEO or another talking about talent. How important talent is to success. How worrisome it is that talent is becoming scarce. And how determined CEOs are to win the race for talent.

At the same time rarely a day seems to pass without a newly clipped Dilbert comic strip getting pasted to someone’s cubicle wall. Dilbert is popular not just for the laughs, but because it so effectively captures the stultifying nature of today’s corporate workplaces.

The contrast is striking. On the one hand we have public declarations of love for talent from the top of the organization. On the other hand skeptical, even cynical messages of unhappiness float up from employees. Ironic, yes—and indicative of a deep problem in how many companies approach and regard their talented workers."

When old cultural assumptions are challenged, innovations are not seen as mere novelties but as a social ill, a critical moral infection, and attacked as such by the upholders of tradition.Philip Slater, The Chrysalis Effect.

Good innovators typically think very big and they think very small. New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details . . . and some are found when you are doing your most abstract and philosophical thinking."Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise, 2012

"When asked why their firms aren't going more to change the way they deliver legal services, 59% of firm leaders say clients aren't asking for it and 56% say they aren't feeling enough economic pain to motivate more significant.The biggest impediment to change . . . is that partners resist most change efforts . . . Only 4% of law firm leaders rated their partners as highly adaptable to change."2016 Law Firms in Transition; An Altman Weil Flash Survey